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Assorted stories from WKYU-FMenCopyright 2015 NPR - For Personal Use OnlyNPR API RSS Generator 0.94Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:31:52 -0400http://media.npr.orghttp://media.npr.org/images/stations/logos/wkyu_fm.gif?s=200WKYU-FM: Owensborohttp://www.npr.org
WKU Public RadioProposed Trail Would Begin in Audubon State Park, Connect with Breckinridge CountyTue, 11 Mar 2014 12:31:52 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/proposed-trail-would-begin-audubon-state-park-connect-breckinridge-county
http://wkyufm.org/post/proposed-trail-would-begin-audubon-state-park-connect-breckinridge-countyKevin Willis240noLatest Tug-of-War Over I-69 Route Pits Owensboro against Evansville, HendersonFri, 28 Feb 2014 18:46:16 -0500http://wkyufm.org/post/latest-tug-war-over-i-69-route-pits-owensboro-against-evansville-henderson
http://wkyufm.org/post/latest-tug-war-over-i-69-route-pits-owensboro-against-evansville-hendersonEmil Moffatt390noPhoto and Video Exhibit at WKU Explores the Stories, People of OwensboroMon, 25 Nov 2013 15:47:16 -0500http://wkyufm.org/post/photo-and-video-exhibit-wku-explores-stories-people-owensboro
http://wkyufm.org/post/photo-and-video-exhibit-wku-explores-stories-people-owensboroKevin Willis539noOwensboro is the Scene for a Summer Camp All About Bill Monroe's Mandolin MusicMon, 16 Sep 2013 10:03:59 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/owensboro-scene-summer-camp-all-about-bill-monroes-mandolin-music
http://wkyufm.org/post/owensboro-scene-summer-camp-all-about-bill-monroes-mandolin-musicKevin Willis240noOwensboro Builds on Old Tradition With Dragon Boat RacesMon, 26 Aug 2013 13:32:29 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/owensboro-builds-old-tradition-dragon-boat-races
http://wkyufm.org/post/owensboro-builds-old-tradition-dragon-boat-racesEmil Moffatt240noNew Hospital, Three Years in the Making, Set to Open Saturday in OwensboroTue, 28 May 2013 17:29:01 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/new-hospital-three-years-making-set-open-saturday-owensboro
http://wkyufm.org/post/new-hospital-three-years-making-set-open-saturday-owensboroKevin Willis239noNew Owensboro Schools Chief: State Should Fully Fund Pre-K EducationTue, 14 May 2013 14:54:54 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/new-owensboro-schools-chief-state-should-fully-fund-pre-k-education
http://wkyufm.org/post/new-owensboro-schools-chief-state-should-fully-fund-pre-k-educationKevin Willis480noIn Owensboro, Those with Celiac Disease Don't Have to Go Without GoodiesAt first glance, this small shop off of Frederica Street looks like any ordinary bakery. The cakes, cookies, and cinnamon rolls on display seem like they fit right in with the kinds of treats you’d find anywhere else. To prove that point, Nancy Faulkner described for a visiting reporter the items scheduled to be picked up on a recent Friday afternoon.

“The first thing I have here are dairy-free, gluten-free cupcakes for a little girl who is having a birthday this weekend," said Faulkner. "Next to that is a red velvet, three-tier, gluten-free, dairy-free birthday cake for some nice lady here in Owensboro. I can’t tell who it is because it’s a big surprise."

Faulkner is the owner and baking guru at Gluten Free Goodies in Owensboro. As its name suggests, Gluten Free Goodies provides the type of desserts and treats that those suffering from celiac disease can usually only dream about.

Living with Celiac

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine thought to affect one in every 133 Americans. The disease is caused by a reaction to a gluten protein found in wheat, and similar proteins found in grains such as rye and barley. The only way to treat the disease is to avoid gluten at all costs.

Faulkner understands this first-hand. In the mid 1980’s, she was constantly sick, experiencing rapid weight loss, joint pain, and extreme fatigue. Finally, after doctors ruled out a host of other maladies, she was diagnosed with celiac.

“Of course, your first thought is ‘what in the world am I going to eat?’, because gluten is in everything,” she says.

Faulkner says finding gluten-free cooking and baking ingredients in the 1980s was a difficult task. She stocked up on rice flour. She ate the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for weeks until she started feeling better. Faulkner and her husband didn’t eat out at restaurants for two years, in order to avoid her coming into contact with gluten.

Then, Faulkner and her husband moved to Owensboro to be closer to her daughter and grandson. She began hearing from others about the lack of local options for gluten-free items. This past May, she opened for business, and has been busy ever since, with some extremely loyal customers making regular treks from as far away as Nashville, Bowling Green, Lexington, and Evansville.

Goodies Made with Exotic-Sounding Ingredients

The kitchen that produces the goodies that make these customers keep coming back is well-stocked with all the essentials for gluten-free baking: sorghum flour, millet flour, whole-grain brown rice flour, tapioca flour, and white rice flour are just a few of the items Faulkner has on hand.

So what’s the difference, say, between making regular cupcakes with chocolate icing versus making gluten-free cupcakes with chocolate icing? Faulkner says for regular cupcakes, you’re going to cream the sugar with the fat, then add eggs while alternating between flour and liquid.

But for gluten-free cupcakes, the process is totally backward.

“You start out with your flour mixes, and your leavening in a mixing bowl,” says Faulkner. “In another bowl you’d mix all of you wet ingredients and then pour that into your batter, and only blend until combined.”

“And if you don’t do it that way, it will be flat as a fritter. It won’t rise.”

Nancy’s favorite customers are the children that suffer from celiac disease or various food allergies that have prevented them from knowing the joys of sharing a birthday cake, or biting into a hot biscuit fresh out of the oven. One of those special customers is an 11-year-old Owensboro boy named Matthew Huston, who has celiac disease and Down’s syndrome.

“Every Thursday is a celebration,” Cindy says. “He wakes up on Thursdays and says, ‘bakery?’. And he knows on Friday mornings he gets a cinnamon roll—that’s his treat for the week. If we have birthday parties coming up, we know we have a place to come and get a cupcake for him to take.”

“Every time we’re invited to a party or gathering I find out the food they’re serving, so I can take a comparable option for him, so that he’s not eating something different.”

Gluten Free Goodies owner Nancy Faulkner says she’s often asked if she’ll expand to other towns. Her husband is after her to open up a store in Bowling Green.

For now, at least, she’s non-committal.

“My husband is probably two years away from retiring a second time, and we’re still young enough to manage it, so we might. Who knows?”

]]>Thu, 27 Sep 2012 09:38:21 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/owensboro-those-celiac-disease-dont-have-go-without-goodies
http://wkyufm.org/post/owensboro-those-celiac-disease-dont-have-go-without-goodiesKevin WillisAt first glance, this small shop off of Frederica Street looks like any ordinary bakery. The cakes, cookies, and cinnamon rolls on display seem like they fit right in with the kinds of treats you’d find anywhere else. To prove that point, Nancy Faulkner described for a visiting reporter the items scheduled to be picked up on a recent Friday afternoon.

“The first thing I have here are dairy-free, gluten-free cupcakes for a little girl who is having a birthday this weekend," said Faulkner. "Next to that is a red velvet, three-tier, gluten-free, dairy-free birthday cake for some nice lady here in Owensboro. I can’t tell who it is because it’s a big surprise."

Faulkner is the owner and baking guru at Gluten Free Goodies in Owensboro. As its name suggests, Gluten Free Goodies provides the type of desserts and treats that those suffering from celiac disease can usually only dream about.

Living with Celiac

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine thought to affect one in every 133 Americans. The disease is caused by a reaction to a gluten protein found in wheat, and similar proteins found in grains such as rye and barley. The only way to treat the disease is to avoid gluten at all costs.

Faulkner understands this first-hand. In the mid 1980’s, she was constantly sick, experiencing rapid weight loss, joint pain, and extreme fatigue. Finally, after doctors ruled out a host of other maladies, she was diagnosed with celiac.

“Of course, your first thought is ‘what in the world am I going to eat?’, because gluten is in everything,” she says.

Faulkner says finding gluten-free cooking and baking ingredients in the 1980s was a difficult task. She stocked up on rice flour. She ate the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for weeks until she started feeling better. Faulkner and her husband didn’t eat out at restaurants for two years, in order to avoid her coming into contact with gluten.

Then, Faulkner and her husband moved to Owensboro to be closer to her daughter and grandson. She began hearing from others about the lack of local options for gluten-free items. This past May, she opened for business, and has been busy ever since, with some extremely loyal customers making regular treks from as far away as Nashville, Bowling Green, Lexington, and Evansville.

Goodies Made with Exotic-Sounding Ingredients

The kitchen that produces the goodies that make these customers keep coming back is well-stocked with all the essentials for gluten-free baking: sorghum flour, millet flour, whole-grain brown rice flour, tapioca flour, and white rice flour are just a few of the items Faulkner has on hand.

So what’s the difference, say, between making regular cupcakes with chocolate icing versus making gluten-free cupcakes with chocolate icing? Faulkner says for regular cupcakes, you’re going to cream the sugar with the fat, then add eggs while alternating between flour and liquid.

But for gluten-free cupcakes, the process is totally backward.

“You start out with your flour mixes, and your leavening in a mixing bowl,” says Faulkner. “In another bowl you’d mix all of you wet ingredients and then pour that into your batter, and only blend until combined.”

“And if you don’t do it that way, it will be flat as a fritter. It won’t rise.”

Nancy’s favorite customers are the children that suffer from celiac disease or various food allergies that have prevented them from knowing the joys of sharing a birthday cake, or biting into a hot biscuit fresh out of the oven. One of those special customers is an 11-year-old Owensboro boy named Matthew Huston, who has celiac disease and Down’s syndrome.

“Every Thursday is a celebration,” Cindy says. “He wakes up on Thursdays and says, ‘bakery?’. And he knows on Friday mornings he gets a cinnamon roll—that’s his treat for the week. If we have birthday parties coming up, we know we have a place to come and get a cupcake for him to take.”

“Every time we’re invited to a party or gathering I find out the food they’re serving, so I can take a comparable option for him, so that he’s not eating something different.”

Gluten Free Goodies owner Nancy Faulkner says she’s often asked if she’ll expand to other towns. Her husband is after her to open up a store in Bowling Green.

For now, at least, she’s non-committal.

“My husband is probably two years away from retiring a second time, and we’re still young enough to manage it, so we might. Who knows?”

]]>240noHigh-Tech Company in Owensboro Helping Local, National Businesses Grow with Social MediaWhen you walk into the downtown office of VE Creative, one of the first things you notice is the set of huge windows facing Owensboro’s 3rd street, a few blocks from the Ohio River. For the small group of workers here, these windows aren’t just a way to view the pretty scenery outside. They’re also a potential way to help generate online and social media street cred for the company, and--more importantly--downtown Owensboro.

“We think it would be really cool to have our twitter feed pulling up on to these windows, during business hours, but especially at night whenever it’s light inside the office and dark outside,” says Nick Knapp, the 24-year-old in charge of building VE Creative’s Owensboro client list.

“People downtown could check in, if they hashtag us their tweets are going to come up on the screens. They could give shout-outs to people.”

These are the types of ideas that happen when you partner a group of tech-savvy 20-year-olds who have an entrepreneurial bent. VE Creative was founded by Nathan Cruse in 2007 during his senior year of college at Murray State. He was studying for a degree in finance, but says he realized the future belonged to web-based technology. So he started advising a few clients in the region about getting websites and content management systems up and running.

Now, Cruse and VE Creative work with clients in Owensboro, as well as those in places as far away as New York City, Las Vegas, and Canada.

“And I think one of the biggest things that we can bring to Owensboro is us being able to go pick up clientele-- whether it’s in Canada, or if it’s in New York--and being able to work with them and bring that money back to Owensboro,” says Cruse.

VE Creative has six full-time employees. They partner with companies, large and small, who want to improve their online presence. That could mean starting a website from scratch, or revamping an existing one. If a company wants its own smart phone app, VE Creative builds one. If a business wants to strengthen its social media presence, Nathan Cruse and his team will work on that.

Cruse says his company is attracting a lot of clients who want to find a way to use Facebook to benefit their business.

“I wouldn’t say right now that a ton of people are doing marketing with it, but they’re setting up for that. They’re saying, ‘hey lets gets our Facebook Timeline up and running, let’s get the cover photo, let’s get the logo in there.’ And now with Facebook, you can offer your products and services on there. People can view your services, they can view your products, and they can get to your website,” says Cruse.

The fact this sort of high-tech small business is able to operate in Owensboro, Kentucky is very telling. We live in a time where a few highly motivated, highly tech-savvy, and highly productive workers can run a lean, efficient small business from virtually anywhere. They don’t have to be in Silicon Valley, New York City, or Tokyo.

Nathan Cruse says it’s also a time when high-tech gadgets are becoming a normal party of more and more people’s lives. And not just young people, but older Americans--like Cruse’s grandmother, for example.

“My grandmother, who is 77, is hopping on Facebook and doing everything she can to utilize her mobile device. So I think our older generation is starting to utilize those things.”

When jokingly asked by WKU Public Radio if he offers any professional advice to his grandmother regarding her online presence, Cruse lets out a laugh.

“The only thing I’d like to tell my Grandmother is ‘let’s not get so political on Facebook’,” he says.

“But she’s doing a great job.”

Cruse says one of the next “big things” he thinks will start gaining more traction is geographical information systems, or “GIS”. Already in use in some places, GIS would allow a person with a smart phone to receive messages from businesses he or she is interested in, whenever that person is in close proximity to that business.

“Whenever you’re traveling past a business, for them to be able to send that information out regarding, say, a 25% off special that day. Some of those things are already being done now, but I think you’re going to start seeing more of that GIS targeting through mobile devices because these are what everybody is going to be using," says Cruse.

]]>Wed, 29 Aug 2012 10:14:05 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/high-tech-company-owensboro-helping-local-national-businesses-grow-social-media
http://wkyufm.org/post/high-tech-company-owensboro-helping-local-national-businesses-grow-social-mediaKevin WillisWhen you walk into the downtown office of VE Creative, one of the first things you notice is the set of huge windows facing Owensboro’s 3rd street, a few blocks from the Ohio River. For the small group of workers here, these windows aren’t just a way to view the pretty scenery outside. They’re also a potential way to help generate online and social media street cred for the company, and--more importantly--downtown Owensboro.

“We think it would be really cool to have our twitter feed pulling up on to these windows, during business hours, but especially at night whenever it’s light inside the office and dark outside,” says Nick Knapp, the 24-year-old in charge of building VE Creative’s Owensboro client list.

“People downtown could check in, if they hashtag us their tweets are going to come up on the screens. They could give shout-outs to people.”

These are the types of ideas that happen when you partner a group of tech-savvy 20-year-olds who have an entrepreneurial bent. VE Creative was founded by Nathan Cruse in 2007 during his senior year of college at Murray State. He was studying for a degree in finance, but says he realized the future belonged to web-based technology. So he started advising a few clients in the region about getting websites and content management systems up and running.

Now, Cruse and VE Creative work with clients in Owensboro, as well as those in places as far away as New York City, Las Vegas, and Canada.

“And I think one of the biggest things that we can bring to Owensboro is us being able to go pick up clientele-- whether it’s in Canada, or if it’s in New York--and being able to work with them and bring that money back to Owensboro,” says Cruse.

VE Creative has six full-time employees. They partner with companies, large and small, who want to improve their online presence. That could mean starting a website from scratch, or revamping an existing one. If a company wants its own smart phone app, VE Creative builds one. If a business wants to strengthen its social media presence, Nathan Cruse and his team will work on that.

Cruse says his company is attracting a lot of clients who want to find a way to use Facebook to benefit their business.

“I wouldn’t say right now that a ton of people are doing marketing with it, but they’re setting up for that. They’re saying, ‘hey lets gets our Facebook Timeline up and running, let’s get the cover photo, let’s get the logo in there.’ And now with Facebook, you can offer your products and services on there. People can view your services, they can view your products, and they can get to your website,” says Cruse.

The fact this sort of high-tech small business is able to operate in Owensboro, Kentucky is very telling. We live in a time where a few highly motivated, highly tech-savvy, and highly productive workers can run a lean, efficient small business from virtually anywhere. They don’t have to be in Silicon Valley, New York City, or Tokyo.

Nathan Cruse says it’s also a time when high-tech gadgets are becoming a normal party of more and more people’s lives. And not just young people, but older Americans--like Cruse’s grandmother, for example.

“My grandmother, who is 77, is hopping on Facebook and doing everything she can to utilize her mobile device. So I think our older generation is starting to utilize those things.”

When jokingly asked by WKU Public Radio if he offers any professional advice to his grandmother regarding her online presence, Cruse lets out a laugh.

“The only thing I’d like to tell my Grandmother is ‘let’s not get so political on Facebook’,” he says.

“But she’s doing a great job.”

Cruse says one of the next “big things” he thinks will start gaining more traction is geographical information systems, or “GIS”. Already in use in some places, GIS would allow a person with a smart phone to receive messages from businesses he or she is interested in, whenever that person is in close proximity to that business.

“Whenever you’re traveling past a business, for them to be able to send that information out regarding, say, a 25% off special that day. Some of those things are already being done now, but I think you’re going to start seeing more of that GIS targeting through mobile devices because these are what everybody is going to be using," says Cruse.

]]>240noJudge Hopes to Boost Public AwarenessThe Chief Judge of the Kentucky Court of Appeals is hoping more people will gain a better understanding of how that court works. Chief Judge Jeff Taylor of Owensboro says the Court of Appeals reviews the correctness of decisions made by trial courts, and conducts sessions around the state to give citizens the opportunity to see how the cases work.]]>Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:38:00 -0400http://wkyufm.org/post/judge-hopes-boost-public-awareness
http://wkyufm.org/post/judge-hopes-boost-public-awarenessDan ModlinThe Chief Judge of the Kentucky Court of Appeals is hoping more people will gain a better understanding of how that court works. Chief Judge Jeff Taylor of Owensboro says the Court of Appeals reviews the correctness of decisions made by trial courts, and conducts sessions around the state to give citizens the opportunity to see how the cases work.]]>239noBenefit Gala is Scheduled to Help the Homeless in OwensboroJames Barnett of the Daniel Pitino Shelter in Owensboro says his agency is seeing more "first-time" homeless than ever. Barnett says the difficult economy has forced people who had never sought assistance in the past to ask for help. ]]>Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:11:20 -0500http://wkyufm.org/post/benefit-gala-scheduled-help-homeless-owensboro
http://wkyufm.org/post/benefit-gala-scheduled-help-homeless-owensboroWKYU-FMJames Barnett of the Daniel Pitino Shelter in Owensboro says his agency is seeing more "first-time" homeless than ever. Barnett says the difficult economy has forced people who had never sought assistance in the past to ask for help. ]]>0no